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diegocaleiro comments on The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions - Less Wrong
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Of course we do. It would be crazy to answer such a question in a social setting if there is any possibility of avoiding it. Social adversaries will take your answer out of context and spin it to make you look bad. Honesty is not the best policy and answering such questions is nearly universally an irrational decision. Even when the questions are answered the responses should not be considered to have a significant correlation to actual behaviour.
I think I have a more plausible suggestion than the "spin it to make you look bad"
Think evolutionarily.
It absolutely sucks to be a psycho serial killer in public, if you are into making friends and acquaintances and likely to be a grandpa.
It sucks less to show that you would kill someone, specially if you were the actor of the death.
It sucks less to show that you would only kill someone by omission, but not by action.
It sucks less if you show that your brain is so well tuned not to kill people, that you (truly) react disgusted even to conceive of doing it.
This is the woman I want to have a child with, the one that is not willing to say she would kill under any circumstance.
Now, you may say that in every case, I simply ignored what would happen to the five other people (the skinny ones). To which I say that your brain processes both informations separately,"me killing fat guy" "people being saved by my action" and you only need one half to trigger all the emotions of "no way I'd kill that fat guy"
Is this an evolutionary nice story that explains a fact with hindsight. Oh yes indeed.
But what really matters is that you compare this theory with the "distortion" theory that many comments suggested. Admit it, only people who enjoy chatting rationally in a blog think it so important that their arguments will be distorted. Common folks just feel bad about killing fat guys.
I'd actually argue that social signaling is probably more important to "common folk" than a lot of the people here. Specifically, the old post about "Why nerds are unpopular" (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) comes to mind here. I'm entirely willing to say "I'm willing to kill", because I value truth above social signaling
It also occurs to me that a big factor in my answer is that my social circle is full of people that I trust not to distort or misapply my answer. Put me in a sufficiently different social circle and eventually my "survival instincts" will get me to opt out of the problem as an excuse to avoid negative signaling.
If I just really didn't want to kill the fat guy, it'd be much easier to say "oh, goodness, I could never kill someone like that!" rather than opting out of answering by playing to the absurdity of the scenario.